


You Can't Lose What You Never Had

by nigeltde



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Amnesia, M/M, Season 3, reference to past underage (Sam was seventeen)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2016-04-25
Packaged: 2018-06-04 08:56:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6651307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nigeltde/pseuds/nigeltde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You can't spend what you ain't got, and you can't lose what you ain't never had.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Can't Lose What You Never Had

**Author's Note:**

> Set towards the end of season three.
> 
> Title and summary courtesy Muddy Waters.
> 
> Big big thanks to [kaligrrrl](http://archiveofourown.org/users/kaligrrrl) for her beta!

“Jesus Christ, are we still in Iowa?”

Dean jumps, halfway through a gulp of water, and manages to spill most of it down his shirt. Sam's voice is deep and rough with sleep, loud in the confines of the car. 

“What big eyes you have, Sammy,” Dean says, throwing the bottle on the seat and swiping at his mouth, his chest. 

Sam shoots him a withering look and turns back to the corn, growing high and green on either side of them. Perfect, just perfect. Dean grits his teeth and breathes deep, resettles his shoulders, hangs his elbow out the window.

He'd been humming along pretty nice by himself, kinda sickly grateful that Sam's lack of sleep had caught up with him, conking him out easy and soft next to Dean, hair curling gently at his neck. His brother's been a grumpy little bitch since Shenandoah — for a solid eight months now, if Dean's being honest, but he's always tried to think of time in shorter chunks. Four minutes until he has to turn _Paranoid_ over; forty miles to the next junction; four hours until there's a chance of food, rest. 

Sam cranes his head to check the position of the sun.

“How long was I out?”

“Couple hours.”

“Shouldn't we be heading east?”

“Construction on the interstate.”

“So?”

Dean sends his own withering look over. Three months left and Sam thinks he's gonna waste it idling behind some granny's Corolla?

Sam's mouth turns down and he grabs at the bottle, sloshes the water through his mouth, nose wrinkled in distaste. 

“Do you even know where you're going?”

“I know everything.”

“You know everything about hangovers and venereal disease, there's a difference,” Sam says, all snippy and purse-mouthed, and it gets Dean's back up because it's not been like that for a while now. Maybe he went a bit overboard at the start there but hell, a guy in his position's got a right to take his fun where and when he can get it.

“Big words from a guy who didn't get laid until college.”

“That's not funny,” Sam says, even more pissed, and Dean laughs. It is pretty funny. Poor kid. Everywhere they went he broke a couple of nerd-girl hearts, never sealed the deal. Always had such a complex about moving around. He might have given Sam a ton of shit about it, but it never surprised Dean that he waited.

“Hey man, nothing to be ashamed about. You know a lot of guys just develop late.”

He waggles his eyebrows at Sam and gets a glare for his troubles. 

“You can cut that shit right out,” Sam snaps. “I'm not in the mood.”

“There's a shocker.” Dean rolls his eyes, checks his mirrors. Futile. No one around, not even a bend in the road. Nothing to deal with but his brother here with a bug up his ass. He wishes he'd kept his trap shut. 

“I'm not in the mood,” Sam says carefully, acid edge to his voice, “to maintain the fiction, so fucking drop it.”

“Hey man, I'm just calling it like I see it. Don't take your inadequacies out on me.” 

Sam shakes his head, nostrils flaring.

“It wasn't like that and you know it.”

“I know what?”

“You _know_ it wasn't like that,” he repeats, and goes silent. Dean frowns, taps his ring against the wheel. Whatever. Sam is a goddamn minefield these days, prickly and distant and full of attitude like he's a teenager all over again. Dean feels like kicking his ass most of the time, just to pull him out of his books, his laptop, his brooding. Get his hands on Sam and wake him up, make him look at Dean properly, make him see. I'm here, I'm here. Be with me, while you can.

He flips the tape and Electric Funeral slinks out of the speakers. Sam reaches out a finger without looking and stabs at the deck, cutting Ozzy off on his first line. 

Dean has pretty much shot people for less and he opens his mouth to tell Sam exactly where he and his bitchy little moods can fuck off to, but one glance at Sam derails him. He's staring out the window, pale and rigid, looks like he's tamping down something strong and wild and fighting not to show it, hands white-knuckled on his thighs. 

Sometimes, when they're drunk or butting heads, Sam says he doesn't want to lose Dean, and when he says it he stares so fiercely into Dean's eyes that Dean's mouth goes dry and he almost forgets that there's this one last thing that he can't do for his brother, to stay on past his time. Anything he'd do for Sam, hang the moon or pull it down, except the one thing Sam wants.

He'd make his deal again in a heartbeat, but he never imagined it would do this to them. 

“So,” he says, and clears his throat. Sam ignores him. It's too quiet in here without the music, even with the breeze buffeting in through the window. “So, then, you never told me. Who was it? That punk girl in Baton Rouge? What was her name? That one who used to walk you home? She always looked a little--” He breaks off and tilts his hand side to side, winces.

“Don't.” He seems kind of hurt. Dean sighs. Missed the mark again.

“Sorry – I was just.”

Sam doesn't even look at him.

“Fuck you,” he mutters.

“Hey, fuck you!”

“Don't talk to me like I'm an asshole,” Sam says, and Dean curls his lip.

“If the shoe fits.”

_“You're_ the one being an asshole!” Sam cries, voice climbing up high, eyes huge and offended, such a perfect and familiar sight that Dean nearly caves.

“Listen, Little Miss Grumpy, I've been staring at corn for the last five hours, I was just trying to make conversation. Why don't you do us both a favour and go back to sleep.”

_“You_ brought it up,” Sam says, clinging to his offence. Dean raises his hands towards the sky in concession.

“Mea culpa, my God, mea culpa.”

Sam sneers at him, settles stiffly back into his seat, picking at his jeans.

“Everything is just a goddamn joke to you, isn't it?” 

“So it _was_ that punk girl!” Dean grins. “She give you a present to take home, huh? No need to be embarrassed man, happens to the best of us.”

Sam flicks his gaze up then, and Dean's not looking straight at him but he can sense the anger in it, intent with a meaning that doesn't fit. He feels his smile drop, strange sinking feeling like he's on the wrong road here, going the wrong way, in the car that he loves more than himself, with the brother he knows better than anyone.

“Look,” Sam hisses. “Maybe it didn't mean shit to you, but it counted for me, okay? Can we just leave it at that.”

“What?” Dean swallows a couple of times, frowning. “What counted?”

“You.”

“Me?”

_“Us.”_

Dean laughs. It's weak, far from the scornful and dismissive sound he's going for, unease pulling at his chest. “Whatever. Fuck you.”

“If the shoe fits,” Sam mutters, which takes Dean a minute to wrap his head around. When he gets there it's like he's been sucker-punched, thoughts not connecting right.

“That's out of line, Sam,” he says, thinly, on the last of his air, dread starting to pool sick and clammy in his guts. He glances over. Sam's back to staring out the window, face blank. He can't be serious. “That's not funny.”

“You're the one laughing.”

“Why would you even say that?”

“What?”

“That's fucked up.”

Sam snorts, rubs his knuckle on the glass and turns his head, tracking something along the verge. Dean could slap him, bright and hard, get him back in here to answer for this bullshit. 

“You shouldn't.” His heartbeat is roaring in his ears, smothering the road noise, smothering everything. “You shouldn't say stuff like that.”

“I told you I wasn't in the mood.”

“Quit it. It's not funny.”

“Never said it was,” Sam says, bitter enough that Dean flinches. 

“What the hell goes on in your head, I don't know.”

“I don't want to talk about it.”

Dean's hands are trembling. He wraps them more securely around the wheel and keeps his eyes forward. Black hood, grey asphalt, blue sky, green corn. No idea how much time passes. Can't get up a good speed on this tractor-pocked road but the way the corn blurs he still feels like he's clipping along, weightless and untethered.

“You know what?” Sam says, abrupt and still angry, and he won't let it go, how can he still be talking? “You're unbelievable.”

_“I'm_ \--?” Dean's dizzy. This has gone so wrong so fast he can barely believe it's happening.

“Why are you pretending?”

“You need to _stop_ ,” Dean says, and puts the full force of his outrage behind it. That shuts Sam up a second and in the blessed silence Dean flounders to get himself in order, to find an explanation. There's no angle to it that he can see, nothing he can think of that would possess Sam to come up with shit like this. 

Dean's never. He _never_. He never even _hinted_. Christ, he'd have to be suicidal. 

In the corner of his eye Sam is studying him, drawing himself up tall and righteous.

“You don't remember,” Sam says, slowly, appalled. Dean's sunk by a baffled wave of despair.

“Stop it.”

“You don't _remember_?”

“There's nothing to remember.”

“Edinburg, Texas. That old farmhouse.”

“Ha!” Dean cries, and thumps the wheel. “I've never been to Edinburg.”

“We _lived_ there, Dean.”

Dean glares venom at him.

“I don't know what kind of sick game you're playing, man, but you need to shut up.”

Sam is staring at him and he doesn't look like he should, doesn't look triumphant or vicious like he's fucking with Dean. His face is white and he's shaking his head with a furious disbelief that starts to seriously freak Dean out, burying right down to his core. Either Sam has finally cracked or he actually believes what he's saying.

“Are you seriously telling me you don't remember? How could you not remember?”

“Remember _what_?”

Sam opens his mouth and a whole terrifying world flashes in front of Dean in which Sam actually says something, something about Dean and him, but after a second he clicks his teeth closed and turns away, muscles jumping in his cheek.

Jesus Christ, finally. Dean rubs an unsteady hand over his face. He's gonna. He's gonna get a separate room tonight. Or find someone in a bar with a room of their own. When they get where they're going he's gonna give Sam a few days on his own to work this out of his system, and then they're going to pretend it never happened, and run his time out with some semblance of sanity.

“You were working at the scrapyard.”

“Oh, for fuck's sake.” Dean throws a hand up in the air, and Sam sets his jaw, mulish.

“It was hot. You'd come home and – _Dean_!” He grabs the wheel and pulls the car back into their lane, and Dean slams his foot down and shoves him away hard enough that he bounces off the passenger door. They slew to a stop, halfway off the shoulder and into the grass.

“Don't you ever touch the wheel while I'm driving.” His voice is a shuddering ruin. He still has his hand out between them, in warning or defence he doesn't know, needing some kind of barrier, something to hide his face behind. He turns the key in the ignition and watches the rev needle drop to a rest. The engine pings at him in annoyance.

He can feel Sam over there gearing up to open his mouth again and he hauls on the door handle, walks around the back of the car and braces himself on the trunk a moment. He's lightheaded, and his knees are still shaking as he treads through the stalks, pushing them apart numbly until he finds a little track he can follow.

It's only a few seconds until a car door slams behind him. His legs give out and gravity drags him down, thumps him into the dirt, swallowed up by the corn. Leaves scratch together over his head. 

Sam crouches in front of him, hands dangling.

“You did something to yourself.”

Dean shakes his head. “No.”

“You _wiped_ it.” 

“Sam.” He's painfully hoarse. “I would never. I never touched you.”

Sam grabs his chin, forces his head up. The knot in Dean's throat stretches out sore and only gets worse when he sees his brother. He gulps convulsively and Sam's eyes soften a fraction.

“You did,” Sam says, and pauses, looks a little queasy himself. “I wanted you to.”

“No, come on, no. You're delusional.”

“I was seventeen.”

Dean shakes his head again, wrenches out of Sam's grip. He remembers when Sam was seventeen. Strong and defiant. Infuriating. Most beautiful thing in his world. 

“It was that bad, huh. You had to go and hoodoo yourself.”

“Sam, listen to what you're saying. This is impossible.”

Sam looks away, huffs a soft breath and rubs at his face, pivots to sit alongside. Dean can feel his body heat. Their elbows are nearly touching.

“Yeah, it was. It was – kind of like this, actually. Big overgrown field out the back. We were sparring. And I got you on the ground for once and you were so pissed. And it just. It escalated. It was nothing major. It was nice. I thought maybe--” He grimaces and looks up, blinking.

“But you left.”

“Of course I left.”

“Of course you left,” Dean echoes, feels like he's swaying, as light as the corn. When he searches for it, there's a hole in that year, his last year with Sam, a few months before his brother got on that bus. Murky and indistinct and the way it slipslides from him when he tries to grab onto it is the only evidence he has that they're not both in the middle of a nervous breakdown. “I don't even know what to…. I got nothing, Sam, I. This is the craziest thing I ever heard.”

“Yeah. Well.”

It was nice, Dean thinks dumbly, staring at his fingers laced together around his knees.

“When you were at Stanford,” he says, and spins his ring on his finger. It glints cheerily in the late-afternoon light. “I went to New York. And I bought this.”

“Yeah?”

“And I don't really – I can't think why, now. Why I did that. But the woman who gave it to me. There was something. It's fuzzy.” Dean puts his hand across his eyes, presses until he sees stars. The metal feels blunt and foreign against his skin. His voice breaks. “Jesus.”

He lost it. It happened and he lost it. He threw it away and now he'll never get it back.

“Was there,” he starts, and it's very hard to go on. “Anything else?”

Next to him Sam breathes in deep, sighs heavily through his nose.

“No. Don't worry about it, Dean,” he says. “It's not a…. I wish like hell you'd never said anything.”

“Sam, I.”

“Guess we better go find you another ring, huh,” he says, sour. Dean can't look at him. 

He goes to get up and Dean snaps out a hand, pressure light on his forearm but he thuds back down in the dirt. He is solid and warm under Dean's palm. Dean licks his lips.

“We were sparring?”

Sam makes a wounded noise. “Don't.”

“We were sparring?”

“Don't make me.”

Dean lifts his head. 

“We were in a field? Like this?”

“Well – like this, but – yeah.” There's red on his cheeks, confusion slanting his eyes. He's ready to bolt, Dean can see that. 

“It was grass?”

“Yeah. But it was turning. It was high. Scratchy.”

“And it was hot.”

“Yeah,” Sam says. “You – had a tank top on.”

“Okay,” Dean says, feels like the word's come from someone else, distant and unscathed. Some kid out there in the heat, twenty-one and riding high, his brother's skin sweaty under his hands, the tall grass hiding them. 

“And I – I blocked your kick and you got really shitty.” He's fighting hard to keep his voice even, braver than Dean's ever been. “And you tried a right hook and I got under it.”

“And you knocked me down.”

“Pinned you. Dean,” he says, pained. Dean slides his hand up Sam's arm and around the back of his hot bare neck, tugs and Sam half falls into him, hides his face by Dean's shoulder, hand propped on the ground by Dean's hip.

“I didn't try to roll you?”

“You tried. Dean, what?”

“Yeah, you were a gangly fucker.”

“Stop it.” There's fear in his voice.

“Loved you though.”

Sam jerks under his hand, starts to pull back and Dean tightens his grip, keeps Sam's face by his shoulder. His mouth is by Sam's ear and Sam's hair is brushing his cheek, soft clean smell.

“And you were on top?” 

A shiver runs through Sam and Dean catches it too, his brother so close and alive and around them the clear wind rustling through the green.

Sam puts a hand to Dean's chest then and clutches a little, sends Dean's heart off on a wild tangent just when it was getting settled again, thumping madly under Sam's unsure fingers as he pops the buttons of Dean's shirt, fumbling one by one down to his belly. 

Dean can't breathe right. Just the proximity is making him ache. He swallows, lets Sam go and leans back, makes more room for his brother and Sam slides his hand up Dean's leg and rests it on his knee, seconds stretching out with his head bowed down so all Dean can see is his hair hanging, the slope of his brow.

“Sam.”

Sam shrugs stiffly, almost painfully. There's space between them again, Sam tilting away. Something going on in that brain of his that Dean can't track and Dean's losing him and he doesn't know where to go from here, by himself. It's not working.

“Talk to me, man.” He sounds desperate to his own ears, feeling Sam slip away from him again, again and always. 

Sam flinches and rolls onto his feet. 

“Sorry.” He's already moving as he says it, pushing through the stalks and vanishing before Dean can stop him, fading into the general sway.

It takes a vacant minute before Dean realises he's really gone, shocked breath wheezing out of him and his face on fire, leaning back like this, offering himself up. Shameless. Ghost pressure of Sam's hand on his knee. He's hard. Sam had been so close to touching him and Dean had been ready for it, Dean was going to let him, that's how fucking turned around he was by all this: year after year of locking this down so tight it nearly choked him, and five seconds with Sam next to him and he was begging for it.

A tractor grumbles along the road and Dean half expects to hear the Impala start up in its wake, hear the familiar creak of her doors as someone gets in and leaves. He waits so long to hear it he thinks it might have happened already.

It hits him in an empty horrified sort of way that Sam's known all this time. Years. At school, with Jess. After. No way Dean could have hidden how deep this ran once they were in it. 

No wonder Sam never wanted to come back on the road.

How is Dean going to get back in the car? 

His stomach turns and he curls forward protectively and takes the ring off, like he's done a million times. Nothing happens, no blinding return to himself. It has some kind of writing inside; he never knew what it was, never cared to know. He just thought he liked it.

He drops it in the dirt.

Stays like that a while, damp of the earth seeping up through his jeans. The light softens, angling sharper through the cornfield. A place like this, Sam had said. A time like this. He'd touched his brother and there's no trace of it in him, no blisters on his palms, no secret reverent place buried inside. 

The corn moves and Sam is standing back in front of him, looking down with his face in shadow, making Dean crane his neck painfully back. He's so tall, so solid in his stance, so broad across the shoulders. Before Stanford he'd been rangy and lean but this had been there in his bones. Dean had seen it, a vision of his brother, grown and whole and strong. He's gonna have to go on alone. Today, tonight, in three months' time. Dean looks at him and thinks about him driving with the wind in his hair. He's done it before. He'll be okay.

“That morning,” Sam says. “I got my acceptance letter. You couldn't tell.”

Dean shakes his head. He would have known. He's sure of it. He would have known, somewhere in his marrow, that thread that held him to his brother, twanging in warning, impending doom. He would have known. 

“I was going to go, I'd already decided, but I – didn't want to be nothing.” 

Sam's voice is tight. It happened anyway, Dean realises. Dean had gotten rid of it like it never meant a thing. 

What had possessed him?

“Sam,” he rasps. 

Sam lifts his shoulder in a slight shrug, twists his mouth with something like an apology. 

Dean can't bear it any more, gets his legs under him and starts standing, and Sam bends down, catches him when he's halfway up and pushes him with firm hands right back down into the dirt, lying there with the rich earth smell rising up around him and stalks and leathery leaves reaching high and vertical to the blue sky, and Sam crouched over him, close and shadowed and secret.

Sam's eyes are set on the centre of Dean's chest. Dean's heart runs away again and takes his brain with it.

“You pinned me,” he says, careful, quiet.

“Yeah,” says Sam, throat working, and Dean puts a hand on his hip and presses until Sam bends a knee awkwardly over and straddles him, weight settling solid in Dean's lap. Sam closes his eyes and off he goes again, could be anywhere, anywhen. Unacceptable. Dean runs his hands up Sam's thighs and shoves them under his shirt, his undershirt, pushing them all askew, muscles jumping under his fingertips. 

He's so fucking built, so much heat and lean strength trapped under there it makes Dean's mouth water. He tugs at the coarse hair low on Sam's belly and Sam's eyes fly open, lock on him, startled and hot. 

He drops his hands to Sam's belt, works it open with a soft jangle, the bulge of Sam's dick close, under his loose jeans.

“Is this how--”

“No,” says Sam, and bites his lip, looking down, and Dean rubs him through the cloth until he whimpers, big and hard under Dean's hand, getting harder as Dean brings him out, resting over the elastic of his boxers, bobbing heavy and full, the smell of him spicing the air. He flicks a glance up and finds Sam watching him darkly, and when Dean curls his hand around his eyes flutter closed again, strange wistful frown curving his eyebrows. 

His brother.

“Did I touch you?” Dean asks, knowing the answer, half afraid of it. He pulls up Sam's dick, fine skin moving under his palm.

“Yeah,” Sam sighs.

God help him, the yearning in Sam's voice. His hand stutters to a stop. What did he do to this kid.

Sure hand around his own gets him moving again, fingers tangling and Sam looking down at him again, kindness edged with an incendiary hungry look that strikes right at the heart of wherever Dean's been hiding, years of his brother being the start and end of his day in ways he didn't even know. Dean's been ready to end the world for him since time began, ready for blood and mutilation and the great black night but he never thought they could be this too, together like this, coaxing Sam's desire out of him, breathless and golden and gorgeous.

When Sam's got Dean at a working pace he lets him go, runs his own hand through his hair and scrubs at his face, stretching tall as the sun above Dean, dick curving out thick and urgent. Dean's never seen anything so perfect in his life. 

Precome shining at the head, a few drops, and Dean gets stupid at the sight of it, crazy thoughts about how Sam doesn't get as wet as he does, holds even that back from him and makes him work for it. He smears his thumb through, rubs circles around the head, nudges under the ridge and feels Sam's body react at the same time as he sees it, shuddering, knees pressing into Dean's sides, mouth dropping open. 

Dean feels his own jaw drop, set and tense with Sam's arousal kicking through him like they're one and the same, twists his hand and jerks him faster. Sam's breath is coming short now, his hips moving fitfully and Dean is so hard it's torture, trapped in his jeans and Sam's ass pressing down all wrong, a bad angle, all he has in his head fixing it, making them fit, driving up into Sam and Sam would be so tight, riding him, he can almost feel it, the perfect squeeze around his dick.

“I'm gonna fuck you,” he pants, “like this,” and Sam groans and arches his back and grinds down, exquisite, hot as sin. “Yeah, you like that?”

Sam laughs breathlessly and doubles over, bends forward and braces himself above.

“So cheesy,” he gasps, and then shuts up as Dean strips him faster, tension rolling through him, building. “Yeah, come on.”

Dean reaches up with his free hand, hooks it into Sam's hair and brings his forehead down to rest against Dean's and that does something to Sam that Dean can't fathom, beat-up noise punching out of him. His hips pump into the circle of Dean's hand and he scrabbles at Dean's shirt, pushes it up and comes onto Dean's bare skin, thick splashes that feel like brands, like it goes on forever, Sam's dick pulsing in his hand, marking him up. 

“Fuck, Sam,” he chokes, spinning out far across any lines he ever thought he had, his brother smearing come onto his stomach with his long clever fingers, breath blasting hot and desperate across his cheek, muscles trembling in the aftermath.

Dean kisses him.

They didn't kiss before. They couldn't have. Dean couldn't have forgotten this feeling, heart in his throat, their chins bumping and the wrong tooth-clacking angle and his brother opening up for him deep and sweet, melting away into the slide of their tongues. 

There's no surprise to the taste of him. He tastes like he smells and he kisses like he's been waiting for it, no finesse, no tricks, just plants his elbows on either side of Dean's head and moans into Dean's mouth, swallows down Dean's breath and his life and his sound mind and spirit.

They're chest to chest, and Dean hooks a leg over Sam's calf to get some leverage, pushing up against Sam's hip and Sam gives him as much as he can, the right angle to rut up. Dean grabs at his ass, runs his hands along the span and dip of his back, reeling with everything he has, this bizarre cornfield gift of his brother.

Sam breaks off, chest heaving, rests his sweaty forehead against Dean's for a brief second. Long enough to get Dean muttering, trying to catch him back but he's moving too fast for Dean to follow, down Dean's body, getting between Dean's legs, shoving them apart and tugging at his belt. Dean's head is spinning, weak and overwhelmed, taste of his brother still in his mouth and his jeans getting torn open.

“Sam?” His voice is high and uncertain to his own ears.

“You wouldn't let me,” Sam says and presses his face into Dean's boxers, breathing deep, mouthing against the urgent ridge of his dick; Dean's so sensitive his head snaps back to roll in the dirt, nerves and bones stretching tight; doesn't see it, nothing he can do to stop Sam pulling him out and licking up the length of him.

Dean locks both his hands in Sam's hair and bends his neck to see Sam's dark gaze on him, his tongue pressed flat against the underside of Dean's dick before he closes his lips around the head and pushes down.

“Mother _fuck_ ,” he gasps, wondrous, and Sam's eyes slip shut, frown of concentration as he takes Dean as deep as he can.

Impossible not to thrust up, wet and messy and eager, head of his dick rubbing along the roof of Sam's mouth, bumping the back of his throat, his brother trying to accommodate, clumsy and tight and awkward and so fucking good to him it makes his heart stop. No small goddamn wonder he didn't let this happen; it's too much, burns so fierce in him that he almost loses himself, fucking up into Sam's mouth, his knees splayed wide and one heel digging into Sam's back, orgasm falling on him like an avalanche, curling his toes, straining every muscle. 

He tries to pull Sam off but Sam fights it, and when he comes Sam's mouth is still on him, swallowing, still working him as he slips out and catches Sam across the chin with the last of it. Sam's eyes widen comically and Dean lets his hair go and thumbs it off his skin. 

Sam catches his wrist and swallows Dean's thumb, licks him clean. Dean can feel his tongue on the pad. 

“Sam,” he says, so hoarse it's like he's never said anything else. He hauls him back up and kisses him, buried under the long length of his brother's weight, dazed, sunk into his mouth, chasing the taste of them together. 

Sam keeps rolling his hips languidly, mindlessly. Their legs are still tangled up and Dean can't stop touching him, the shifting muscles of his back, the vulnerable underside of his jaw, the proud line of his cheekbone.

A few minutes like that – hours maybe, days, Dean's in no state to know – and Sam drags his mouth down Dean's cheek and buries his face in the junction of Dean's shoulder and neck with a sigh that Dean feels in his bones. He cups the back of his brother's head, massages through his soft hair to his scalp. Sam rumbles in relief.

The mess on Dean's stomach is starting to pull and itch and he doesn't care; could lie here forever, sweat cooling on his brow and his brother in his arms and the light still the warm sunset haze of memory. 

To have this and then throw it away. Unthinkable. This is something to keep. Something to write into his soul, no chance of losing it. 

“Then what?”

He feels Sam smile, press a chaste kiss into his collarbone. He noses at the corner of Dean's jaw and then rolls off him, pushes himself up to sitting. Corn rising up young and strong above him. Must be seven feet tall.

“Then nothing.” He knuckles at the corner of his eye and yawns. Dean mirrors it helplessly. “I left, and then...I left.”

The earth is damp under Dean's back. He tugs at his shirt, tries to put himself back together, fumbling with his jeans. His fingers don't want to work, and Sam chuckles, pleased with himself, bats Dean's hands away and zips him up, rebuckles his belt. Dean grins at him lazily and God help them both, Sam blushes and ducks his head.

Dean's brother, honestly.

Sam's eye catches on something and he frowns, digs in the dirt and picks up the ring, brushes it clean. Angles it to see the inscription inside, inscrutable. Dean doesn't even know what language it is, no idea if Sam can read it.

“Hey.”

Dean rests his hand on Sam's knee and squeezes. He's got three months left, and that's weeks, hours upon hours, room to make more memories, to lay his brother out and learn him like a second language. Get him so deep that no spell could erase him, and when he's ash he'll go up to the sky and take part of Sam with him.

“Hey. It's not like that now.”

Sam's face is smoothing out, losing the smile that was playing around the corners of his eyes, the fond curve of his mouth that Dean put there. He folds the ring back into Dean's palm, closes Dean's fingers over, and like that he's so far from him that Dean's blood runs cold.

“No,” says Sam, and turns his face away, looks around at the corn, the green leaves edged in brown, turning slowly, and in his voice Dean glimpses an echoing desolate hint of it, of the cruel and desperate unbearable feeling that might make someone crawl through the door of a witch's shop and plead for release. 

“No,” says Sam again, and Dean stares at his shadowed face and loves him more than his body can adequately stand. “You're right. I'm not going anywhere.”

::

The end. 

**Author's Note:**

> feedback/concrit welcome.
> 
> [Rebloggable tumblr link for those so inclined.](http://nigeltde-fic.tumblr.com/post/143374506121/you-cant-lose-what-you-never-had-5608-words-by)


End file.
